UX audits: a key tool to improve your user experience

A good user experience (UX) is key to the success of basically any digital product or service. A smooth and engaging user experience can make the difference between developing a loyal user base or simply frustrating your visitors.  

A UX audit helps you ensure that your product is meeting user expectations while still aligned with business goals. In this article, we’ll cover the basics of a UX audit, the steps to conduct one, and what metrics you can use to evaluate the overall experience of your product.  

What is a UX audit?  

A UX audit is a detailed assessment of a digital product, such as a website, app, or software platform, to find any usability issues as well as opportunities for improvement. 

The UX audit process involves evaluating key aspects of the user experience, including navigation, design, content, and accessibility. By collecting and analysing user data and feedback, a UX audit can help your team understand how well your digital product is meeting user needs and expectations. 

When is a UX audit a good idea? 

A UX audit can be a valuable tool at various stages of a product’s lifecycle. Depending on when you conduct the audit, you can prevent issues or optimise an existing service.  

Let’s look at some scenarios where conducting a UX audit is especially beneficial: 

Steps to a UX audit 

Taking a structured approach to your audit helps ensure you cover all your bases and gain meaningful insights. Let’s go through the essential steps you should follow! 

Define scope and goals 

Before diving into an audit, it’s important to set clear objectives and guidelines so the project stays manageable, and that the outcome is useful. 

Scope  

Start by scoping out the audit by choosing what parts of the product you’ll be evaluating. You might be looking to do an overall check on the entire platform, or you might get more value from looking at specific sections such as onboarding flows, your checkout, or key pages of a site.   

It’s also important to set an endpoint to the audit to prevent scope creep. Defining what will and won’t be included helps focus your efforts. 

Goals 

Establish what you aim to achieve. Are you trying to improve usability, reduce bounce rates, or enhance conversions? Defining goals ensures the audit stays focused and results are measurable.  

Identify stakeholders and user personas 

It’s helpful to involve your internal stakeholders who will benefit from the findings, as well as clarify the users whose experiences you’re optimising.  

Identify the internal teams or individuals who will use the audit results, such as designers, developers, marketers, or product managers. Engaging these stakeholders early helps align expectations and ensures the audit addresses both user needs and business priorities.  

When thinking about the user experience, it can be valuable to use customer personas. Personas represent key segments of your audience, based on characteristics such as demographics, behaviours, goals, and pain points. By grounding your work in personas, you can assess whether your product truly meets the needs of your target users. 

As an example, let’s say one of your customer personas is a busy professional who needs quick and efficient navigation so they can select and purchase their product as soon as possible. Your audit can then focus on evaluating the usability of key workflows like search or checkout.  

Inventory your content and get relevant data 

The next step is creating a comprehensive inventory of your product’s components, including content and features. 

• Content: Catalogue text, images, videos, and interactive elements on a tool like Google Sheets or Airtable to create a detailed content inventory. This inventory serves as a central reference point for analysing each element. 

• Features: Identify critical features, such as forms, buttons, and navigation menus, that are critical to the user journey. 

• User data: Pair the inventory with analytics data, such as page views, clicks, and bounce rates, to understand performance. 

This inventory acts as a foundation for assessing what works, what doesn’t, and what’s missing. 

Evaluate and analyse your data 

Once your inventory is complete, it’s time to evaluate how well your product meets user needs. First set your evaluation criteria. This can be aspects like: 

• Usability: Are features easy to use and intuitive? Are there pain points causing confusion or frustration? For example, if users frequently abandon the checkout process, it may indicate unclear steps or too many required fields, causing frustration. 

• Accessibility: Does the product meet accessibility standards (e.g., WCAG standards) to ensure all users, including those with disabilities, can engage with it? For instance, selecting text colours with poor contrast against the background (e.g., light grey text on a white background) may be difficult for users with visual impairments to read. 

• Consistency: Is the design and content consistent across pages or screens? Test your site or service on both mobile and desktop.  

• Relevance: Does the content align with user goals and business objectives? Is it up-to-date and useful? For instance, a landing page promoting a sale that ended weeks ago may frustrate users and lead to lost opportunities. 
  
• Performance: Evaluate how quickly pages load and how well interactive features function. A product page that takes even over five seconds to load can lead to higher bounce rates. 

Identify issues 

Now that you’ve evaluated your product, identify the key issues and areas for improvement. 

• Prioritise fixing problems: Group issues based on their impact on usability and business outcomes. High-impact problems, such as a broken navigation menu, should be the priority. 

• Highlight opportunities: Identify gaps or areas where new features or enhancements could elevate the experience. For example, if users frequently abandon a checkout page, simplifying the process or adding progress indicators could help. 
  
• Document your findings: Provide graphs and analytics to support your observations. 

Develop an action plan 

With a clear understanding of what needs improvement, you can now create a roadmap to address the issues you found: 

• Prioritise tasks: Rank fixes based on urgency and effort required. For example, correcting a broken link may take minutes, while redesigning a user journey could require weeks of work. 

• Assign responsibilities and set a timeline: Ensure accountability by assigning team members to each task and set up clear deadlines for each action item to track progress. 
  
• Measure success: Define metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of changes. Did bounce rates decrease? Did conversions improve? 

Tools required  

Conducting a UX audit is made easier and more efficient with the right tools. Here we have broadly categorised tools into three types: inventory tools, analysis tools, and collaboration tools. 

Inventory tools 

Inventory tools help you document and organise the components of your product, such as pages, features, and content. 

• Screaming Frog: Ideal for crawling websites and creating a detailed inventory of URLs, meta descriptions, headers, and other elements. 

• Google Sheets or Airtable: Useful for creating custom and easily shareable content inventories where you can add notes, track progress, and categorise findings. 
  
• Content management system export features: Many CMS (e.g., WordPress, Drupal) allow you to export site data.  

Analysis tools 

Analysis tools help you evaluate the performance and usability of your product by providing data and insights. 

• Google Analytics: Analyse user behaviour, bounce rates, and traffic patterns to identify areas that may need attention. 

• Hotjar: Use heatmaps and session recordings to visualise how users interact with your site. 
  
• Website Builder statistics dashboard: one.com’s own Website Builder provides you with well-developed statistics dashboard to stay on top of all your metrics.  

Collaboration tools 

Collaboration tools aid in communication and project management during the audit process, especially if you’re working within a team. 

• Miro or FigJam: Use these tools to create shared visual boards for mapping user journeys or writing out findings. 

• Slack or Microsoft Teams: Help with real-time communication and keep stakeholders updated. 

• Jira or Asana: Organise and track tasks related to the audit with a kanban board system.  

Using a combination of these tools ensures your audit is thorough, data-driven, and efficiently managed. 

Best practices 

To get the most value from your UX audit, follow these best practices. Getting cross-team input, maintaining a user-centric focus, and documentation will help ensure you get impactful results. 

Involve cross-functional teams 

Collaboration is key to a successful UX audit. You might want to get input from: 

• Designers: This will help ensure the visual and interactive elements align with UX best practices. 

• Developers: To address technical constraints or opportunities. 

• Marketers and product managers: To ensure the product aligns with user and business goals. 

• Customer support teams: Their firsthand knowledge of common user complaints can uncover overlooked issues. 

Having diverse perspectives ensures your audit is holistic and actionable. 

Maintain a user-centric focus 

Always evaluate your product from the user’s point of view. Conduct walkthroughs and usability tests to identify barriers and friction in the user journey. 

Consider both quantitative and qualitative data 

A robust UX audit relies on a balance of numbers and narratives. Gathering both quantitative and qualitative data will help you fully capture the user experience on your site.  

Analytics tools like Google Analytics provide hard metrics such as click-through rates, bounce rates, time on page, or task completion rates. Having this hard data will help you identify problem areas and assess their impact.  

Meanwhile, user feedback, interviews, usability tests, and session recordings reveal the “why” behind the numbers. For instance, while analytics may show high drop-off rates, qualitative methods can uncover confusion about a specific feature or navigation flow. 

Document your findings  

Thorough documentation keeps your audit findings clear, actionable, and accessible. Use simple language, visuals like screenshots or heatmaps, and organize issues by priority and category. Store the findings in a shared platform, such as Notion or Confluence, to support both immediate action and future reference. 

Enhance your UX with a thoughtful content audit 

A UX audit is a great way to eliminate pain points and find new opportunities in your digital product. By evaluating usability, the overall content, and your current performance, you can align your product with user expectations and business goals.  

Whether you’re addressing declining metrics, preparing for a redesign, or simply maintaining quality, a thoughtful UX audit ensures your product evolves alongside user needs. Start your audit today and take the first step toward an improved user experience.